Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

The film includes archival footage taken by my grandfather during a 1931 visit to Horodok, the family village. By then the owner of a successful fabric mill,

My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. —

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins floated away from me like dozens of life rafts.

all my life I had the sense that something was amiss. I was different, an outsider. My family didn’t form a coherent whole. My parents and I lived in a breakable world. I had been deeply, mutely certain that there was something very wrong with me, that for all this I was to blame.

There had been something amiss. We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.

From another index card: Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”

I tried to navigate the difficulties of being my mother’s daughter. But my single best defense had always been that I was my father’s daughter. I was more my father’s daughter. I had somehow convinced myself that I was only my father’s daughter.

If it was true, if A.T. was indeed my first cousin, then an uncle of his—either his father’s brother or his mother’s brother—would be my biological father. —

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

The friends are named Kushner. Many years later, their son will be arrested and imprisoned in a tawdry case involving hookers and embezzlement. Their grandson will marry Ivanka Trump. But on this day, the Kushners are just nice older people, quite a bit older than my parents.

This is what Jewish looks like, I would think, a kind of internal fuck you. I led with being Jewish wherever I went in the world. It was like a parlor trick, something guaranteed to produce interest, even amazement. You, Jewish? No way.

Instead, I ended up buying the packages of index cards, understanding something I couldn’t have articulated: my life was now in fragments I would need to shuffle and reshuffle in any attempt to make sense of it.

It had always been the case. My father had never been my father. A doctor from Portland had always been my father. I was not who I thought I had been. But I was who I had always been.

What I wanted: confirmation from someone—an expert—that it was possible, no, more than possible, likely, no, more than likely, absolutely the case, that my parents had known nothing. The Farris Institute had hoodwinked them. Gone rogue. Someone must have decided it would be in this couple’s best interest to add donor sperm to the mix without telling them. Maybe the institute was trying to increase its success rates. Or Dr. Edmond Farris had decided to play God. —

Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is the process by which the mind seeks to confirm what it already believes. When in the throes of confirmation bias, we seek and interpret information that will allow us to continue to hold on to our beliefs, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

“So you’re telling me that my father would have proceeded with total acceptance?” “What I’m telling you,” Lookstein said, “is that he would have felt he had done a huge mitzvah.”

“So, just wondering—does this mean maybe I won’t end up bald?” Michael and I burst out laughing. My father and grandfather had heads like cue balls. I hadn’t known it had even occurred to Jacob that it was hereditary. Ben Walden, on the other hand, did indeed have an excellent head of hair.

She would turn her beautiful, darting eyes on me, and I would feel pride. I may only have one, but I hit the jackpot, she would say. As if it were a lottery. She had won me. I was her prize.

Until I was in my mid-thirties—I met Michael at thirty-four, and Jacob was born days after I turned thirty-seven—my inner world was defined and shaped by longing. This longing was vast, wide, and I was not able to put words to

“Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.” Her

“You have to judge things by the result,” Shirley continued. “And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success.

Perhaps as I was watching YouTube videos of Santa and grandchildren’s excursions to SeaWorld, they were reading essays about my father’s time with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or my spiritual journey away from my strict religious upbringing.

“The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.”

And so I built my narrative edifice, brick by brick: my mother was a pathological narcissist who had a borderline personality disorder; my father was depressed, shattered by marital misfortune; I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who looked like she could have gotten bread from the Nazis; I was the hard-won only child of my older parents. My sense of otherness derived from these—and only these—facts.

“Who am I?” I whispered and paused. I couldn’t remember the other two. We were silent for a long moment. Outside his office, on the main street of Stockbridge, I could hear the whoosh of a passing car, the chirp of a lone bird. Finally, he continued. “Why am I here?” Tears ran down my temples and into my hair. He paused before offering me the last question. “And how shall I live?”

will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

wrote him about a favorite novel, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and he wrote back that it was one of his favorites as well, so much so that he had recently read it for a second time. Was it a coincidence that we both loved the Stegner?

A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility.

The narrative my mother clung to as if it were the only buoy in the sea was the way she had managed to get through her life. It had contributed to her becoming a miserable, alien creature, a woman who radiated rage. When the careful seams of her well-honed narrative momentarily came undone—my daughter was conceived in Philadelphia—she quickly stitched them up again.

my time on tour once again had the strange quality of being on one side of a split screen while I held the rest at bay. It was hard work, this compartmentalization, this pushing away of what most consumed me. The sheer psychic effort of it was exhausting.